Clothes Give Us Working Girls A Strategic Advantage.

By Karen and Erica

We have always liked dressing for work. It’s fun, and it’s strategic. And women do it best.

Of course, we like dressing for anything.

The most fun was, and is, dressing for a date with our girlfriends. We can wear whatever we might dream up—pure color, leather or pvc, tights and tunics, leopard pants, crazy tops. It’s all about us!

We dress up for other dates, too (now, with our husbands.) We’re never sure how we might be received, so sometimes we tone it down. But in the end we still dress for ourselves, and If the gent we’re with has other views, too bad. What does he know????

For work, of course, the analysis was and is different.

As lawyers, we presented ourselves as members of the firm or of the bar, and often as a client representative. That meant we had to comply with implicit or explicit dress codes. At first, we were relegated to black and navy (we never wore brown) and to skirt suits that looked like awkward versions of men’s clothes.

We got tired of that. Once we found our footing we learned how to be ourselves within the relevant constraints. To think outside the box but to show we understood the box.

We followed the male lead in one respect. Suits were key. Suits were powerful, and they provided essential coverage. (We figured out why men wore them.) The great news was—they did not have to be male. A suit could be cut in a way that enhanced the bodies we actually had, not someone’s fantasy mini-man body. A suit could be made in a fabric other than stiff-upper-lip heavy wool. A suit, in other words, could be very female, yet still meet the unwritten code. Subversion at its best.

Then—a big breakthrough—pantsuits—also built for women. Followed by other innovations. Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses. Pink shoes. Purple tote bags. We would never express our personal style at the expense of being professional, but we began to find our own workday expression. Pretty soon, people saw us as lawyers, and as women, and saw that we knew how to dress as both.

Casual Fridays came along pretty late in our careers, and felt like a trap. You can never be really casual at work, so what was actually going on? A test to see if we could look like we just came off the golf course? It took some effort to figure out Casual Fridays. Suffice it to say we were not that casual.

Today, our office is a teensy glass-walled office for two, in a WeWork in midtown Manhattan. (Providentially, it is across the street from the side entrance to Saks—though we would prefer to be across from the side entrance to Century 21. Please come back!) (Oddly, it seems Saks itself is to host Wework sites!)

Lustre has no mandated dress code, and for the most part suits for work are history for us. But we still dress for success. And that means we try to calibrate what we are wearing to what we are doing—meeting investors, huddling with our team, Zooming, working alone. And it’s never a bad idea to look as if we are going to an elegant dinner after work—even if we are making that dinner ourselves.

A lot of women are now working in ways we could hardly have imagined when we started out. They are founding companies, or working for startups, and generally charting new paths in the most exciting ways. But the role of clothes seems to have diminished. Especially for those living in that fashion wasteland, Silicon Valley. Are clothes just too frivolous for the people creating the metaverse?

We suggest that women remember the power of clothes. Women still need to fight for their positions, and dressing is one of the traditional channels by which women, in particular, signal their power. Just as important, clothes are gratifying, and give you a range of expressive options. (Men are limited to little strips of cloth—and seem all too ready to give up even those!)

Don’t let’s follow the men into an untucked world. Let’s keep our strategic advantage. And let’s have fun with it!